I don't remember a time when I couldn't read. When the black marks on the page meant nothing. When I couldn't escape from this world to another, full of hope and opportunity and dragons. When I couldn't find something out by myself, or make something new just by reading the instructions of a recipe.
I don't remember what I did before I had the AC. What did I do with all that time? Where did I go? How was my life anywhere near as good as it was after his birth? How did I manage without his cuddles, his kisses, his spontaneous I love you's?
I don't remember last Christmas, I don't know where we went or what we did. I know what I got the AC - it's there in the corner of the room - but I don't remember who we shared Christmas with. Or New Year. Or much about last year at all. I just don't remember.
I don't remember how bad life felt before J. I refuse to remember how it felt to go to bed on my own, night after night. I refuse to dwell on the pain, on that first feeling in the morning when there is every chance it is all some horrendous dream and Rich is downstairs asleep on the sofa, and how it felt when the crashing realisation hit me that he wasn't. I don't remember the pain of I-t-B scattering his ashes somewhere. Anywhere. I refuse to live with that pain, and so I *won't* remember.
These days, I don't remember to do the things I've said I will, or to do the ordinary things of life, although that is getting better, slowly. Life is full of memories, and of not memories. Of what I choose to remember, of what I choose to forget, of what I forget by myself, of what my brain chooses to forget to spare me the pain.
I look at the sleeping child, and I wonder what he remembers. What he will remember when he is bigger.
And I remember that today is 500 days since Rich died.
I remember.
